First, I will unabashedly say that I am among the many individuals who has been making a significant portion of my income performing v.o. for years, and is rather displeased with the direction that the voice over business has taken over the past few years.

This “direction” goes beyond any disappointments that the recession by itself might bring.

It has led to the bleeding out of the professional performing arts unions, to the point where these somewhat bitter rivals have adopted to merge. This merger was by overwhelming decree of their membership, who has been finding themselves making less and less and having to work harder and harder. This new union, still seems to be made up of the same representation (and thinking) that created the long commercials strike of 2001, which led to millions of production dollars being syphoned off the U.S. into Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and well, just about anywhere that isn’t the U.S.

Given the great coverage the press gives to anything even remotely connected to voice over, it’s no wonder that you can’t walk 5 blocks from home without tripping over somebody who “claims” to be a voice over actor.  From the enormous coverage and subsequent deluge of work and money for Mr. Homeless Guy, Ted Williams to the moronic worldwide statements by Chris Rock, “This isn’t work. Stripping wood is work …and then they pay me a million dollars, <to do voices>”, it seems that everybody wants their mythical piece of the billion dollar voice over pie.

No amount of rationalization it seems is going to stave off the onslaught of individuals who attempt to get into voice over. And just like the welfare recipient who tosses their precious few dollars at weekly lottery numbers, so are most of these people being sold a bill of goods that’s only slightly better than the odds of winning a decent lottery payoff.

Yes, many will argue that they’re managing to pay bills and buy food, but when you look at the effort and time they put into it, you can’t believe they are either happy or even actually making minimum wage for all the time, expense and aggravation they are putting in.

Sadly the biggest problem is that many of the trusted partners for actors seem to be anything but trusted.

Currently, there’s a huge movement that wants to blame online casting sites for many of the current problems in voice over. If that’s so, then we could also probably blame the automobile industry for hurting the railroads. But, there is an online casting service that seems to be praised by talent agents and actors; an online casting service that actually doesn’t even purport to be an online casting service. A service where one of their spokespeople recently badmouthed online casting services to me and several other voice actors, referring to the other sites as “pay to play”, in a derogatory fashion and defending their business model, which sells services to talent agents and actors on a subscription basis and funnels numerous scripts for purposes of auditioning. (Gee that kind of sounds like “Pay to Play” to me)

Who are they? They call themselves Voicebank, although they have other names, like Voiceregistry, etc.

So, let’s compare these Knights In Shining White Armor to a particularly maligned online casting service, Voice 123:

Voicebank has been doing a great job of getting major advertising agencies and even minor ad agencies to send them voice over audition scripts, which in turn are funneled out to the various talent agents who pay a fee to Voicebank to be part of their service. You can see who these agents are by going to www.Voicebank.net

In turn; the agents send these scripts to some of their actors. Actually, in most cases, the agents will send the scripts to as many of the actors they represent as possible. (The more auditions for the agency, the greater the chance of getting one of them booked) Some actors who are represented in 5 or 6 or 10 markets may actually wind up getting the same audition script sent to them by 4 or 5 or more of their agents. These scripts aren’t always for top of the line jobs either. As of late, there tends to be a considerable number of scripts for smaller local work, which even when covered by a SAG/ AFTRA agreement, may pay well less than $1,000. In other cases, the scripts are non-union and may be for as little as a $350 job.

So, now if you have 5 agents representing you and you get sent the same script sent to you by all 5 agents and it’s for a $500 job, you have several conundrums. The first is which agent do you read for. Most will say either your primary agent, the agent in the largest market or the agent that sent it to you first. But as someone who has worked with ad agencies and other clients in the casting and hiring process, it’s doubtful that any ad agency will even listen to auditions from more than 3 or 4 talent agents tops. So, the bigger question isn’t about you now competing against the rosters of 30 or 40 talent agencies, but “What are the odds that your audition will even ever be heard?”

I’d have to say that if you’ve risen to the ranks of being a working and represented talent and now are seeing a growing number of your auditions being filtered through Voicebank, whereby you are competing against 30 – 60 talent agencies for each audition, perhaps each agency having 40 or more talent reading, you’re going to see a very real decrease in what you book and ergo, what you make.

And realize that Voicebank is aggressively pitching this service to every hirer of talent in the country. They also have support from their member talent agencies and the union(s), as well as many actors.

So let me ask you how an audition through Voicebank that pits you against a potential talent pool of 2,500 other actors for a $500 voice gig is a good thing. Could you explain to me how this is any better than reading against 30 or so actors on Voice 123 for a $500 job? Or how it might be even a percentage as good as trying to develop your own advocates to help hire you.

Individuals complain because the transparency of Voice 123 allows them to see if their audition has been heard or not, but somehow they have difficulty doing the math. Look people, I know that an ad agency will rarely listen to more than 100 auditions tops for anything, and rarely will they ever listen to nearly that many. But even assuming that the ad agency does listen to 100 auditions, and there are 50 talent agents who respond to the casting, you are still only one out of 2,000 auditions. That means that there’s about a 5% chance your audition will ever be heard. Of course, that’s not quite accurate. If you’re a well-known voice actor, the client will make efforts to pick your name out of the list. Depending upon who your agent is, they may have a better chance of having their auditions listened to by one or more particular ad agencies. But this also means that others may rarely, if ever, have any of their auditions opened.

To me, my livelihood, my business, Voicebank is the worst of all possible intruders. Because it doesn’t matter how good your audition is, if the client never gets to hear it. It also means that I have to make a conscious choice every time I get multiple requests to audition by several agents for the same project.

Sadly, the v.o. folks who comprise most of the rosters of New York, L.A. and Chicago talent agencies, tend to be closed books. Old-timers in particular were taught to never discuss their work. But I can tell you that behind closed doors, often under the influence of a bit of “medicinal whisky”, voice talent who have been top bookers for years, grossing well over $100,000, are seeing booking ratios diminish considerably, and income drops that are quite scary. At best, most of these actors when pushed against a wall will tell you that their wells may be somewhat deep, but are also quite narrow. Just take a look at top v.o. names in your markets who are suddenly teaching acting, or are shifting their attention to other forms of work.

I’m not sure what the solution or counter to Voicebank is, but it certainly shouldn’t be giving them some sort of award or prize.

Let’s stop pretending that we can tell the good guys from the bad guys by whether they wear a white or black hat. That type of thinking died with Gunsmoke. Voice Over is a multi-billion dollar business.

Some of us will ask a hundred people their opinion on something before we make a decision. Others seemingly can make major decisions with little forethought.  We go online and read reviews and see what others might have to say about their experiences. There are the usual problems regarding whether the person leaving a review has some sort of personal agenda, works for the company or might be a competitor, or perhaps is simply someone who has been paid to say specific things about any given product, service, business or person.

Recently, I did some digging on a product that had a fairly low “star” rating. It seems that there were only a handful of people who had rated the item and one of them gave it a single star, yet mentioned it was a great product. Their issue was they were sold an extended warranty, which they found out after the fact, was a rip-off. Or at least that’s THEIR experience.

Sadly, I believe most people, including me on an average day, would have just seen that low star rating and moved on.

I read a review of another product not that long ago and it became clear to me that the reviewer was relatively unclear on the concept as to the limitations of the particular item. Again, had I just gone on the main page 2.5 out of 5 rating, I might have missed what for me was a great opportunity.

Internet communications is a difficult enough thing to begin with and I have been misinterpreted many times after leaving remarks in a forum or thread. I suspect that might be the case with most people. Generally speaking, I have trouble with people who might leave unqualified and unsubstantiated comments that say things such as “I tried that and it was a complete waste of money. Save your time and money”

Those types of statements pop up all the time and they just don’t really give us any information. Who is this person? Why did they have a problem? Is there anything that remotely parallels their experiences with mine?

But it is equally as frustrating to have someone chime in with a completely unqualified and unsupported “I love it. It changed my life. You have to try it.”

Given that many people are rather afraid of saying anything negative online, the path many groups, forums , etc. tend to take is “Jump in. The water is fine.” In fact, it tends to be a bit more upbeat than that, filled with what I and a few other cynics refer to as “Cotton Candy, Unicorn, Rainbow dreams and promises”

And under this umbrella of “acceptance, warmth and encouragement”, I have heard some of the worst advice any human being could ever hope to get or give. The internet, as we know is not a great haven for truth, even if we’re not discussing the fact that “Sexy19Chick” is really a 57-year-old man who lives in his mother’s basement.

I just wonder how anybody can flat-out give advice to someone they don’t know, without the slightest inkling of understanding that person’s unique circumstances. But what I find even more interesting is how people will accept unqualified advice, simply because it’s what they want to hear.

It happened in a LinkedIn group recently, whereby somebody made a statement that she had taken a class from someone and that the teacher was incredible. Most psychology books will tell you that this is a normal way to feel when one has just spent $500 or so dollars. The need to rationalize the purchase is extremely strong. So, then what about this experience was so incredible?

In this particular case, the class was a voice over class. There was no attempt to qualify the statement, because it simply couldn’t be done. Was this person making more money as a result of taking the class? No. Were they able to register any milestone or goals as a result of taking this class? No. Is this person making any sort of living doing voice over? Well, so far a bit less than the $500 they spent on the class.

So what made the class so terrific? The teacher told her what she wanted to hear. She was entertained. And she (falsely) believes the effect of taking this class on her life and well-being to be of far greater import than it actually was.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t take classes or that they shouldn’t listen to another’s opinion.

Yelp is full of recommendations made by people who were, in many cases sold a bill of goods and don’t even know they were conned. Even if their ceiling were to fall in a year later, they’re not going to go online and find all the places they gave glowing recommendations on and then retract them. In most cases they wouldn’t remember their passwords, let alone their sites.
Others leave positive reviews because they are lured by promises of discounts.

And there are more than just a few reasons why somebody might vindictively leave some negative recommendation.

The women who made the recommendation regarding the teacher in most likelihood will have moved on to some other vocation in another few months, yet she might still make this recommendation years into the future.

Get to know somebody before you make or take a recommendation. And more importantly, QUALIFY your recommendations and ask others to qualify theirs. If somebody has gotten healthier, wealthier or wiser from some sort of experience, I’d like to know about it and I’d also like to know about them. It may or may not pertain to me. We are all individuals and if we look at recommendations as “medicine”, it becomes clear that what may be one’s medicine may be another’s poison.

Also, think long and hard about whether your personal experience was what you think it was. An average trip can somehow become magical when we really want to have something to say and when we are coaxed on by the land of Unicorns and Cotton Candy. Conversely, we may not realize our misplaced rage before we hit the send button. It’s happened to me more than once.

Advertising  Age  just came out with their annual list of the 10 best ad agencies in America. I must admit that I have a great deal of trouble with the word “best”, even in the rare occasion someone may be applying the word to me or something I’ve done.

While I’m not sure what “best” means, I do know that none of the current 10 shops can say they haven’t put out some lousy stuff. It happens to everyone. But what does best mean? Does that mean they won a bunch of awards? Does it mean that the agency was able to buy up 10 other agencies this past year? Does it mean that they lucked out and didn’t wind up losing too many billings from clients putting them into review? Does it mean their billings for the year went through the roof?

Perhaps because I tend to work too much in a vacuum these days, there were a couple of agency names I had never heard of. And you can’t say it’s because they’re tiny shops, because this year’s winners featured agencies with as many as 10,000 employees. (The article came out a few weeks ago, so it could be up to 11,000) The smallest agency on the list has 120 employees, although I suspect that number will be going up pretty soon too.

Maybe, I’ve been out of the loop and a 120 employee agency is considered small, what about some of the agencies I’ve contracted to do creative with that have 25 people or less. In some case, they have 3 or 4 people. There must be a new category for these agencies. Maybe like in the dog world, where ultra-small dogs are now called “teacup”. Are these agencies with less than 100 people “teacup” agencies or should we have a different term for them, like “muy pequino” or “micro agency” or “mini-me”? Never mind, that last one was taken in Austin Powers.

Hmmm, micro-agency. I thought for the heck, I’d Google “Micro agency” and apparently at least one ad agency called StrawberryFrog is using it. Darn and I thought I made the term up.  But with offices in Mumbai, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo and New York, StrawberryFrog seems far from what I would call micro.

Now Johnny Diaz, who works out of a 12 X 10 office without a parking space, that’s micro.

Oh boy, it seems like I just digressed 2 or 3 good paragraphs worth, which may even be a record for me. Now what was I saying? Oh yeah, what the hell does “best” mean anyway?

Considering that I always like sticking to the brief and looking at things from the client’s viewpoint, I think that best would be the kind of agency that manages to break new ground, come up with the unexpected and help propel their clients agenda and (hopefully, but not always), their bottom line.

Maybe it’s also because the projects I get to deal with often have budgets that are lower than the Mocha Frappuccino bill alone that some of the big boys ring up, I tend not to get too impressed even when something really cool comes along that creative billed out at a couple of million. For criminy sakes, I have some friends who have made incredible feature length films for less dough than that.

As an ADDY Awards coordinator and occasional entrant, I was always amazed at how the judges almost always invariably went for the high priced stuff. The usual suspects tend to win the regional and national gold and silver awards. Quite frankly, I wish the folks who did the spots for “Head On – Apply Directly to the Forehead” had entered a few awards shows. Want to talk about best? They took a crummy “as seen on tv” product and catapulted it to the top of an insipidly crowded and difficult product category. They did it on a relative shoestring too. That to me is “best”

Best, is the agency who figured out how to get a $100,000 budget to play a million bucks. Best is the kid who entered a competition for Chevy and got to have his “Happy Grad “commercial air during this year’s Superbowl game. Although technically, he wouldn’t have gotten to do that if it wasn’t for Goodby, who held the contest that he won. I’m wondering though how they’ll justify doing another commercial for a million dollars after they’ve aired one that cost $15,000. That’s advertising for you.

I like the show “So You Think You Can Dance”. One thing I particularly like about them as opposed to the “American Idol”, is that SYTYCD bills itself not as presenting America’s “BEST” dancer, but uses the word “Favorite”. Although I suppose we could get into a bit of a pissing match regarding favorite, as in “who’s favorite and why”. Since, ultimately the dancer with the most votes wins, and the voters represent America and anybody can vote, then it would seem it is indeed a popular vote. Popular = favorite.

But heck, you can’t even say that about the President of the United States. I saw something recently that showed a person could be elected President with less than 35% of the popular vote.  George W. Bush didn’t have the popular vote. He wasn’t the favorite, but instead some people speaking for us figured he was the “best” choice. There’s that darn “Best” screwing things up again.

In all fairness, Advertising Age did list some smaller shops in a “Standouts to Watch” category, but that seems a lot like going to the prom with your cousin. (I’m not sure what I even mean by that, so you’ll have to come up with your own interpretation.)

And I’m not against the process they used, despite my having no idea what the criteria for “Best” ad agency is or was. Heck, they’re the authority. I’m a nobody.  I just wish they’d call it “Advertising Age’s Favorite 10 Agencies, as opposed to “best”.

My hat’s off to all the hard working advertising agency people who will never make it to the “Best Ten” list, probably won’t make it to the “Standouts to Watch List” and perhaps missed the prom and/ or the Superbowl because they were working on a client presentation. Just keep selling stuff.

And if you need a hand, I’m here and I’d like to be your favorite.

I’m writing this before the Giants and Patriots meet in the 2012 Superbowl championship game. I’ve noticed that while in years past, very few of the scheduled Superbowl ads were leaked prior to the big game, this year, it appears that all, or almost all of them are on YouTube, Hulu or otherwise available for public consumption.

Whether this is an attempt to squeeze every precious drop of promotional blood from them or simply a response to what many people believe will be a record low viewership for the Superbowl is anybody’s guess.

Perhaps not strangely, while in the past I have been invited to numerous lavish Superbowl parties and events, as well as having been featured on a panel here and there to give my critiques of the commercials, this year I have one invite to go to an out of the way sports bar with a friend and watch the game on 1 of 7  – 23 inch t.v.’s strewn around a bar that has been in desperate need of a facelift since 1978. If I accept the invite, I suspect I’ll be spending more time playing Ms. Pac Man and Foosball than actually watching the game.

So, given the fact that I may actually miss the airing of the infamous Superbowl commercials, because I may not actually be watching the Superbowl, it’s nice to be able to see them now.

This morning I got to view one from S.F. agency Venables Bell for their client Audi, which has been dubbed “Twilight”. Clearly this was designed to work on an audience that might view it once or twice. That’s the beauty of a Superbowl ad, you can blow 4 or 5 million on creative and a media buy and not have to design an ad that can be viewed 6,217 times.

I won’t give it away if you haven’t seen it. But I will say that its attention to detail is impeccable and it is extremely well produced. Take a minute out now and watch it.

Now for purposes of full disclosure, I’ve been a big fan of Paul Venables for quite some time and had the pleasure of working on some projects that he was the driving force for when he was at Goodby. I also get to work with some amazing folks at Venables in my current capacity as the spokesperson for Conoco’s Philips 66. Some of the spots are featured here on my voice over page.

http://jsgilbert.com/voiceover/

But getting back to this year’s Audi spot, I think that this has all the freshness, fun and relevance that I felt was missing from a prior Superbowl spot they did for Audi, that was based on the Godfather.  I may be shooting myself in the foot, but I, who was and still am a huge fan of the Godfather, just didn’t  enjoy that spot.

Then again, we can always say that I’m not the right demographic.

Someone asked me earlier today if I thought this new commerical would sell cars and my response was “No, but it’ll get people thinking about AUDI. AUDI will sell the cars, not the commercial ”.

Relationships are complex, interesting things.

Some span considerable distances. Others bridge across different languages and cultures.

Some of my better clients are people I’ve never met in person and probably won’t.

The same may be said of many people I call my friend.

Some are strictly electronic. Some, I couldn’t even tell you if the person I’m communicating with is young or old. And in one notable case, I wasn’t sure if the person was male or female.

Dogs and cats have their own web pages with thousands of followers.

The earth turns very much the same way it always has, it’s just everything else about this big blue ball that has changed, and keeps changing.

And it seems that part of this change is that our communication is really pretty poor. Considering that we have microwaves that cook our dinner in seconds, cars that get us vast distances in no time (not to mention planes) and all the other “time saving” conveniences afforded to modern man, it should seem like we would all have nothing but time on our hands. Time to communicate.

But it seems that we don’t.

So what that often means is…

Things don’t get explained.

Things don’t get double checked.

People don’t exchange pleasantries.

We are now communicating in shorthand.

We look for the easy way out.

We want somebody we can blame.

We don’t have time to look for the truth.

We take the convenient road.

We prefer to believe a good lie.

We’d rather reject somebody on the basis of a few cosmetic differences, than instead look at the things we may have in common.

We’d rather hold other cultures up to the light of scrutiny by comparing their culture to ours, instead of taking the effort to try to see things from their perspective.

We over commit, under execute and make excuses.

We hope our problems will go away if we simply ignore them for long enough.

We turn to others to bail us out of our jams.

We don’t say please or thank you.

We take things for granted.

Back in the dark ages of salesmanship, (perhaps even today) the would be salesperson was told, “On average, it takes 7 no’s to get 1 yes”. I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that the 7 no’s should be from the same person.

So from both the standpoint of being a person who needs to market himself, as well as someone who is marketed to, where is that tipping point between being effective and keeping oneself “top of mind” and the urge to push the “do not call, write, email or even think of me again button”?

Case in point are the fine folks at Omaha Steaks. I buy them once in a while, when they are on super special and there’s somebody very particular I want to send a specific gift of meat to. Truthfully, since one often doesn’t know if someone is a vegan or dyed in the wool carnivore these days, nor whether spouse, child units, etc. may have meat issues, the gift of meat is one I would tend to tread lightly with anyway.

It would be great if the Omaha Steaks people sent me an email once every few months, perhaps a postcard or some other offer 3 or 4 times a year. That seems reasonable and would probably keep them somewhat in my thoughts and be a cost-effective way of keeping a customer, albeit not a huge consuming customer, making the occasional purchase.

This however is not the case. In the past 3 months, I have received over 20 items in my mail box, along with an average of 1.5 emails per day, which was topped off by a phone call to my cell phone the other day. I was actually able to take the call and quite curious to see who it was from, since I had apparently been called by that same number 5 times without being left a message.

But then again, maybe they need all this marketing, because when you come right down to it, they’re really asking you to buy 24 oz of frozen meat for what you could get fresh meat for at generally about the same price as their shipping alone.

Living in a large metropolitan area that is filled to the brim with quality purveyors of almost every type of product one might need or want, and being a bit of the amateur chef myself, it’s highly doubtful I would ever need to purchase Omaha’s highly overpriced, frozen meats over a fresh-cut of Neiman Ranch’s finest at 1/5th the price. And yes, I do understand that for a mere $6 extra per 4 oz steak, Omaha is wrapping a piece of bacon around it.

The interesting thing is that Omaha’s massive campaign to get me to buy more has backfired. I could have been content to be a once or twice a year consumer, becuase it”s kind of different and somewhat cool. But they got me to thinking. And I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way.

And I’m sorry to be picking on Omaha Steaks, but I guess that’s what top-of-mind can do for you. Realistically, I could have picked any number of places from my local “designer perfume store” to the annoying “overseas musician”, who sends me form emails every two weeks telling me to hire him for all my game composing needs. I’ve actually sent him back several replies to take me off his list and that I don’t hire game music composers, but he persists.

For the average human being who may be interfacing with hundreds of businesses per year, the clutter and annoyance can be immense. In some cases, one can truly opt out; push a button and that’s it. In other cases, the opting out simply triggers new contacts to be made which may go under the heading of “We want you back”, “What do we have to do?” or “Please don’t go!!!”

And of course, in many cases we really don’t want to opt out completely, we just don’t want to be so heavily opted in.

Some of you may think I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, but the facts are that there will be more “information” created in the year 2012 than in all recorded history up until this point.

In my next blog post, I would like to list some of your thoughts and opinions on this subject. I’ll also toss in a few of my  experiences from both the good and the bad pile.

What is the right way to try to stay top of mind?

Do you believe that everyone should be a “brand”?

What works or doesn’t work for you in terms of marketing?

Have you dealt with your own marketing that was “less than effective”?

Anybody out there doing it right? Anybody doing it wrong?